Athlete video production in London: filming Dominic Solanke for Blue Lock's - Diamonds in the Rough
By Violetta Coretnic - Producer & Co-founder, We Stream.
Athlete shoots almost never fail on creativity. They fail on access. You can have the script, the storyboard, the crew, and the kit - and then the talent window moves, the venue changes with two days' notice, and you find out what your production company is actually made of. In April 2026 we produced the shoot day for Blue Lock × Dominic Solanke - "Diamonds in the Rough", a social campaign for Kodansha's Blue Lock franchise, commissioned through Story Arc Inc. in Los Angeles. The original plan gave us four hours with Dom at one venue. What we actually got was roughly 90 minutes of filming time at a Premier League training ground confirmed 48 hours before the shoot.
The brief: put a Premier League striker
inside a manga universe
Blue Lock, if you haven't crossed paths with it, is one of the biggest sports manga and anime franchises in the world - a story built around a brutal national programme to manufacture the perfect striker. The campaign idea was sharp: Dominic Solanke, Tottenham Hotspur's striker, delivering a monologue to camera in the voice of the franchise's notorious coach figure. Intense, snarky, full tough-love mode. The film would intercut his delivery with training b-roll and stylised manga panels, launching a fan competition under #bluelockdiamonds on 27 May.
Story Arc, the LA agency producing the campaign for Kodansha, needed a London production partner for the shoot day itself. Their team would handle the edit, the animation treatment, the music. We would handle everything that happens before and during the moment a camera rolls, and the colour grade at the end.
That split sounds simple on paper. It almost never is. When an agency is eight time zones away, the local partner isn't just operating cameras. You become the agency's eyes, their contingency plan, and occasionally their wardrobe department.
What changed in the eight days before the shoot
Getting eight crew accredited at a Premier League training ground in under two hours
The PLI certificate went over before they formally asked for it. After 325 shoots, you learn which documents a venue is going to want, and sending them early is the cheapest goodwill you'll ever buy. It's also, in our experience, the difference between a security team that works with you on the day and one that works against you.
That goodwill paid off almost immediately. Official site access was confirmed for 08:15. When the crew arrived, a staff member on the ground helped identify the right entry point and informally waved us in early - setup began at 07:40, which bought us 35 extra minutes against a schedule that had none to spare.
Power was confirmed only when we walked onto the pitch. The pitch turned out to be indoor, but the kit didn't go to waste: overcast conditions shifted to intermittent sunshine mid-shoot, and the lighting team spent the entire b-roll session repositioning flags, diffusion frames, and the butterfly to hold consistent exposure on Dom as the light through the venue changed.
This is the part of the proposal conversation that usually gets squeezed. Bringing contingency kit costs money and adds complexity, and on a calmer production you'd refine the package 72 hours out instead. We've recommended exactly that to Story Arc for next time. But when the venue is confirmed at 23:00 the night before, over-preparation is the only kind of preparation there is.
What a 06:40 call time buys you when talent has 90 minutes
The scripted monologue went down first, shot at 25fps. Then b-roll: dribbling, footwork, ball work across the pitch, captured on two Sony FX3s at 100fps so the edit could speed-ramp freely. We also recorded isolated takes of the opening and closing lines, so the LA editors would have flexibility without needing a pickup day that was never going to exist.
Two decisions on the day mattered more than anything in the plan. First, we cut the goal-kicking setups from the b-roll schedule - rigging them would have eaten time the compressed window couldn't afford, so alternative b-roll was devised on the spot. Second, the lavalier mic came off for the b-roll block. Dom was more comfortable without it, the boom held ambient sound throughout, and a relaxed athlete on camera is worth more than a redundant audio channel.
Wrap was 11:30, ahead of schedule. Dom went to training. Spurs had one further requirement - the training ground couldn't be identifiable in the final edit - so camera angles during the talking head were adjusted on set to comply. The kind of constraint you only handle gracefully if someone on the crew is thinking about the deliverable, not just the shot list.
Next-day delivery:
69 video clips, 36 audio files, one link
We've delivered next-day on every project since May 2022 and never missed a deadline. It's less about heroics than habit: cards are backed up to drives immediately after every shoot, and the delivery structure is decided before the shoot, not after.
Colour grading across eight time zones:
cut to delivery in under 48 hours
The cut arrived late on 27 April - a clip list with timecodes and a rough cut for reference, with one condition attached: the film had to be finalised in LA by the end of that week. Our contract allowed five business days for the grade. The schedule allowed nothing like it.
Email across eight time zones is slow, so we didn't stay there. A WhatsApp group went up the same day, and by 21:00 London time - early afternoon in LA - our colourist and their editor were on a Google Meet, screens shared, comparing timelines clip by clip until both sides were working from the same sequence. The clean XML came through that evening. The grade was built in DaVinci on the original camera files and delivered via Frame.io at 18:42 on 29 April.
You could argue the screen-share call wasn't in scope. We'd argue it's the whole job. A technically perfect grade the client's editor can't reintegrate is worth nothing, and the cost of one call is always lower than the cost of three rounds of confused file exchanges.
The edit we made that nobody asked for
Their answer taught us something about the constraints they were working inside. Licensing limited the music they could use, and rights restrictions meant certain franchise material couldn't appear in the clip at all - boundaries that shaped their cut in ways we, sitting outside the rights conversation, couldn't see. But the version we sent was passed along to their editor for inspiration, and elements of it fed into the finished film. Their editor's response, more or less: he wished we could have done the whole edit, but the client's requirements meant it had to stay on their side.
We probably wouldn't do this on every project. On this one it felt right: the b-roll was carrying more weight than originally planned, we knew the footage better than anyone, and the campaign deserved the strongest film the material could support. Whether a production partner cares about the final film or just their portion of it - you usually find out exactly here.
What happened when the film went live
As of 12 June - just over two weeks in, with the competition still open - the film has passed 170,000 views, and the launch announcement alone has drawn 7,629 likes and 3,314 shares. Full campaign results will be added here once the competition closes.
The finished film - the hero piece of the campaign, with Story Arc's edit, animation treatment, and our footage and grade - is live here: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DYSGkpBOeNm/. The wider campaign ran for weeks beyond it, with influencer content and participant entries building around the hero film as its anchor.
Kodansha's written feedback, when the project closed out: "The video came out looking fantastic. We're all very pleased with how it came out."
And Story Arc's founder, Douglas Parker, put it in a way no case study could improve on: "Can't believe I found your crew. Serendipity!" Followed, a few messages later, by "I'll find more reasons to shoot in London."
What this job is really evidence of
If you're an agency outside the UK planning a shoot with talent, a sensitive venue, or both, the question worth asking a London production partner isn't "what's your kit list". It's "what happens when the plan changes inside 48 hours" - because on athlete productions, it will. Venue moved with two days' notice. Talent window cut by more than half. Archival footage gone. T-shirts reprinted the evening before, with our producer reaching the print facility at 18:27 against a 19:00 close, backup shirt in hand in case the print failed. Even the football the production supplied arrived flat; we inflated it and bought a spare. Then a broken XML, fixed on a screen-share between London and LA, and a grade delivered in under 48 hours against a contract that allowed five business days.
None of that appears in the finished film. That's the point. The finished film looks like a campaign that went exactly to plan.
A shoot day is rarely won on the shoot day.
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